Posts Tagged ‘bird flu’
Two new respiratory viruses originating in different regions of the globe have caught the attention of international health officials. The novel coronavirus (NCoV) in the Middle East and bird flu outbreaks in China are triggering fears of global pandemics. Last week, reports stated the SARS-like novel coronavirus had spread to France where two patients are [...]
A new study has mapped 20 global hotspots for animal-human diseases. Thirteen “unlucky” zoonoses (diseases transmitted from animals to humans) are responsible for 2.4 billion human illnesses and 2.2 million deaths per year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nigeria, Tanzania and Ethiopia in Africa, and India in Asia suffer from widespread illness and death due to zoonotic illness. [...]
Move over, government health agencies. It turns out Google does a pretty good job tracking the flu. So good, in fact, that researchers at Johns Hopkins University say hospitals may be better off following Google Flu Trends than government data. They found a strong correlation between spikes in internet searches for flu information and numbers [...]
Grocery shopping abroad can be exciting. This is especially true for expats living in countries where open-air markets are common. But while heaps of fresh food may be a welcome change from the supermarket, they can also carry health risks–particularly if they have feathers. A new study has definitively linked live poultry markets in China [...]
For years people have been writing about the potential for an apocalyptic flu outbreak. In fact, just this year we got a new apocalyptic flu movie: Contagion. One of the reasons this hasn’t happened is that deadly flu strains like H5N1 (bird flu) don’t jump from human to human as effectively as seasonal flu strains–the kind [...]
While expats have known for a long time that obesity increases their chances of developing conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, it may also limit the effectiveness of flu vaccines. New research published in the International Journal of Obesity shows that obesity impairs peoples’ immune responses to vaccinations. The study reports for the first [...]
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